Syria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Safadi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advance the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

Writing to the vice president of the European commission in 2013, MEPs Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes summed up Khartabil’s contributions as “opening up the internet in Syria - a country with a notorious record of online censorship” and “vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people”. Among his awards included the 2013 Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award for using technology to promote an open and free internet.

But Khartabil is in trouble. He was detained by Syria’s Assad regime in March 2012 and in October he was removed from the notoriously violent Adra prison in Damascus. His current whereabouts are unknown and in November 2015 rumours surfaced that he had been secretly sentenced to death – perhaps even killed already – by the regime.

The open technology and content communities behind projects like Wikipedia, Mozilla and Creative Commons are gravely concerned. They want to know Khartabil’s status – if he is alive or dead and where he is, and recently circulated a petition for his release and a FreeBassel campaign on Twitter.

He is a brother of ours who has been taken

Lawrence Lessig

“He is a brother of ours who has been taken,” sums up Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor and government reform activist who co-founded Creative Commons, which provides an open alternative to the copyright system of reuse with the aim of enabling greater sharing of cultural work. The Creative Commons default is you can use it as long as you credit it.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered Khartabil’s case in April 2015 declaring his detention and prosecution to be arbitrary and calling for his immediate release. “He’s a good guy and, as we know, his detention has been certified as arbitrary by the experts,” says Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia contributed by volunteers, referring to the group’s findings.

‘Captured in the line of duty’

For Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, former CEO of Creative Commons and friend of Khartabil, it is a reminder that community members do work that is dangerous. “He was captured in the line of duty and was representing our movement,” he says.

Khartabil was heavily involved with many of the world’s leading free software and culture organisations. Through Aiki Lab he was the Syrian lead for Creative Commons. He helped artists, writers and others in Syria as well as the wider Arab World to freely share their work online and build on others’ creativity under CC licences. He was also involved in the English and Arab language versions of Wikipedia, contributing, editing and translating articles as well as organising hackatons.

For Mozilla, Khartabil wrote code to make the open-source Firefox web browser, for which the organisation is most well known, work in Arabic. “He was one of the first people to introduce a lot of Arabic into these things” says Dana Trometer, a long-time friend of Khartabil’s and an organiser of the FreeBassel campaign.

From Adra prison he also provided input to develop the New Palmyra Project, launched in October 2015 after he disappeared. That project, which uses open web infrastructure, seeks to virtually reconstruct the ancient ruins of Palmyra. The Syrian site was seized this year by Isis who has set about systematically destroying the remains. “Bassel is the originator and primary source of vision behind [the New Palmyra Project] and we were in communication with him up until about two months ago,” explains its interim director Barry Threw who is also a FreeBassel campaign organiser. The hope is it will help Syrians trying to come to terms with the destruction of their iconic ruins as well as be a “positive gesture” to aid in Khartabil’s release, he says. To pursue the project, Ito has offered Khartabil a research position at the Media Lab and Creative Commons has offered a voluntary appointment as a Digital Cultural Preservation Fellow, neither of which he can take up.

Khartabil, 34, was born and raised in Syria, the only child of a Palestinian historian father and a Syrian mother. The household valued tradition but also creativity and at an early age he became interested in computers and coding through his uncle. In 2001 he completed a computer science degree at Damascus University and in 2004 a masters in software engineering in Riga, Latvia.

His interest in open-source software, suggest his friends, probably derived from the fact that he had little money to spend on commercial software and that he saw it as a valuable educational tool because it was easy to modify and improve. “Bassel, at heart, is a teacher,” says Threw. It also, no doubt, offered some possibility of evading Syria’s internet censors.

Talent beyond programming

It was around 2008, alongside a day job as chief technology officer for Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeology and cultural preservation in Syria, that Khartabil started to provide technical help for Creative Commons which was trying to build up its presence in the Middle East. The organisation charged him with creating the HTML code for Egyptian and Jordanian creative commons licences in Arabic recalls Diane Peters, the general counsel of Creative Commons who at that time was also in charge of the organisation’s affiliate networks. But, she adds, it quickly became evident that he had talent beyond just being a fast programmer. Khartabil was also a natural and gifted community organiser. He began organising meetings with content producers in Syria to help them understand what Creative Commons was and how it could help them spread their work. Peters pegs the moment Creative Commons took off in Syria to a conference organised by Khartabil in late 2009. A US open source delegation - which included Ito and Peters – had travelled to the Middle East and Khartabil held an event at the University of Damascus. “We thought it would be a 30 person conference but there were hundreds of people in this audience,” she recalls. In mid 2010, Khartabil started Aiki Lab in Damascus. Billed as a “collaborative technology and art space”, about 70 hackers were involved and it held gatherings, workshops and classes. It became Creative Commons official affiliate in Syria, which it remains today.

But Khartabil’s most enduring Creative Commons legacy, Peters argues, was in leading negotiations that established a common language for talking about Creative Commons in Arabic. Those negotiations in late 2010 in Doha involved community members and legal experts from more than six Arab countries each with different dialects. Heated at times, Khartabil forged consensus on the words that would be used to describe the new concepts and sentiments Creative Commons was introducing (the Arabic word ‘Masha’ - which means a parcel of land with no one single owner but many owners – was settled on for ‘Commons’). “Thanks to Bassel, for the first time [in the Middle East] we had groundwork for thinking about Creative Commons that was not jurisdiction or country specific,” she says. It is the language included in all Arab countries CC licences today.

The Arabic translation for Creative Commons licenses that Bassel Khartabil was instrumental in achieving Photograph: Muhammad Basheer/CC BY

Ito recalls a humble, understated, selfless and hard-working man with the power to draw people in. He was always bringing gifts, says Ito, singling out kefir and t-shirts. And, though quiet, Khartabil “would giggle like Beavis and Butt-head,” he says. He remembers accompanying him on a mission to get a famous Damascus based artist and his friends to contribute their works to Creative Commons. Three levels down in the basement of the artist’s house, which had once been a Roman wine cellar, Ito explained what Creative Commons was while Khartabil translated. Finally, beginning with the famous artist, each got up to announce they would contribute their works to shouts and cheers. Khartabil was chuckling mirthfully. “It was a wonderful moment and if it weren’t for Bassel we would never have been able to get into a place like that,” says Ito.

Though quiet, Khartabil 'would giggle like Beavis and Butt-head'

Joi Ito

For Jon Phillips, another long time friend of Khartabil’s and organiser of the FreeBassel campaign, Khartabil’s work has a common thread. Whether Khartabil was cajoling artists to share, translating Wikipedia articles into Arabic or using his skills to do 3D design on the Palmyra Project (the Al-Aous project to also virtually reconstruct the ruins which Khartabil was leading for the company and which the New Palmyra project is a spin-off of), he was “building up his country’s culture”. “I think of him more as an artist or a poet – creating,” he says.

Khartabil’s arrest

Khartabil was arrested in March 2012, a year after the start of the Syrian uprising which began as part of the Arab Spring protests. It was a few weeks before he was due to marry his finance, Noura Ghazi, a Syrian human rights lawyer who he got to know after he asked her to pursue the case of a detained friend.

Amnesty International reports he was detained incommunicado for nine months and interrogated and tortured by security forces. There was a brief appearance before a military judge in December 2012 where he was charged with harming state security. Never sentenced, Khartabil was then sent to the lower security Adra prison where Ghazi was able to visit him. He kept busy painting, doing crafts and teaching computer theory to fellow prisoners. His handwritten letters contained apologies for the “lo-fi” technology.

Khartabil and Ghazi were married in prison in January 2013. “We got nicknamed the bride and groom of the Syrian revolution,” his wife says. Trometer believes the reason he was moved to Adra was a reaction by the government to pressure from the international open-source community to expose his whereabouts. “I think it pushed the regime to do something,” she says.

Yet in early October 2015, Khartabil was transferred to an undisclosed location and has not been seen since. His wife has heard that he was moved to military police headquarters in al-Qaboun where a military field court sentenced him to death and he may already have been executed, though these reports remain unconfirmed by authorities. “Even though I am a lawyer I cannot help my husband,” she says. “His court is a secret military court and and he has no right to have a lawyer.”

He was an activist for a free internet, not an activist in the political sense of trying to overthrow the government

Dana Trometer

The original reason for Khartabil’s arrest also remains unknown. But it also isn’t hard to see why a government trying to quell an uprising might see someone helping others share material on the internet as a threat.

“It is strongly suspected that his arrest was designed to stifle free expression in Syria, and restrict Syrian citizens’ abilities to engage with online communities and discourses,” the MEPs also wrote to the vice president of the European commission in 2013. “He was a leader in a movement which is about connecting people globally,” says Lessig. “I imagine inside Syria that made him something of a threat.” He was an activist for a free internet, not an activist in the political sense of trying to overthrow the government, says Trometer.

Danny O’Brien of the digital rights defender the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is also campaigning for Khartabil’s release, says there is a new pattern of authoritarian regimes targeting technologists in the same way they do journalists and human rights lawyers.

For Ito, people like Khartabil are needed now more than ever in the region to build up the infrastructure to sustain cultural connections with the rest of the internet-dominated world. “To this day there isn’t really anybody quite like Bassel in the Arab open source movement,” he says.